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Deep in the Australian Outback, Kitty Green is, once again, asking us to sit on a knife’s edge, where the threat of violence is constant. In The Assistant, which also starred Julia Garner as a headstrong underling in an environment dominated by men, Green was attuned to the systemic abuses of the entertainment industry. In The Royal Hotel, she considers the ways infrastructural inequities pervade even in the most remote corners of our world.

Green’s film is loosely based on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, in which director Pete Gleeson provided a glimpse into a remote mining town where backpackers are cycled in and out as bartenders, or, as a sandwich board labels them in The Royal Hotel, “fresh meat” to be ogled at and harassed. Here, that fresh meat is Hanna (Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), two American tourists who’ve desperately sought out a work-tourism exchange program...

Four years after director Kitty Green and actor Julia Garner channeled whispers and silence into the stuff of workplace horror in The Assistant, they reunite for a movie that turns up the volume and ratchets up the fear and loathing. Way up.

Instead of the careerist corridors of Manhattan, the setting is a mining town in Australia — specifically, a hotel bar frequented by hard-drinking men. Garner, again, is extraordinary, and the chemistry between her and an equally superb Jessica Henwick, as best friends whose backpacking adventure takes a detour into a kind of hell, doesn’t hit a false note. Yet despite the flawless performances and outstanding craftsmanship, The Royal Hotel is a pummeling experience rather than a revelatory one.

For her second narrative feature, and her first film set and filmed in her native Australia, Green was inspired by the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, in which Pete Gleeson chronicles the...